Category Archives: Photojournalism

At Nanyang Polytechnic’s School of Design, year 2 students of the Visual Communication course are introduced to photojournalism; for the students who took an elective in photography whilst in year 1, this is the one project they find themselves raring to go and can’t wait to sink their teeth in.

These youths start out with blank canvases but at the end of the project, from their photographs emanate a thousand words from their hearts and minds.

By making photographs that seem to show our favorite celebs (Diana, Elton John) doing what we really, secretly, want to see them doing, Alison Jackson explores our desire to get personal with celebs. Contains graphic images.

About Alison Jackson

Why can’t you make it through the checkout line without flipping through page after page of pregnant celebs in Us magazine? Alison Jackson knows why.

Recognizing the deep-seated need of the world public to see the Queen mum seated at the toilet, Elton John getting a colonic, and Keith Richards ironing his knickers, Alison Jackson set out to create the images that we really want paparazzi to capture. Armed with cheap photographic equipment, celebrity look-alikes, and a canny sense of what we think people are doing when we’re not looking, she creates images that are equal parts belly laughs and pure scandal.

Jackson’s newest book, Alison Jackson: Confidential features over 300 of her images in outrageous succession. She is also the auteur behind the popular BBC series “Double Take,” which focuses on the (fake) outrageous behavior of dozens of popular British political, entertainment, and sports figures. Her biggest frustration is the penchant of her doppelgangers’ real life subjects to take on behavior more outrageous than her photographs.

“She fearlessly tugs away at the curtain that separates what we assume we know and what we really know about our icons and movers-and-shakers, and the result is stunning”

Photographer Rick Smolan tells the unforgettable story of a young Amerasian girl, a fateful photograph, and an adoption saga with a twist.

About Rick Smolan

Rick Smolan is the co-founder of the America 24/7 and Day in the Life photography series — and a natural storyteller in many media. His latest books are America at Home and Blue Planet Run.

Photographer Rick Smolan is the co-creator of the America at Home project, which captured the “emotions of home” across the United States during a week in September 2008. More than 20,000 photographers — pros and amateurs — sent images to a team of editors assembled by Smolan and partner Jennifer Erwitt, who turned the photos into an eye-popping book. It’s become a best-seller, of course, helped along by the fact that buyers can choose their own image for the cover.

Smolan has long been a force for exploring culture through photography. The Day in the Life photography series that he cofounded — best-selling photo books that captured life in America, Australia, the Soviet Union … — were an ’80s cultural phenomenon. (Rare was the coffee table without at least one of them.)

In the 1990s his production company, Against All Odds, investigated the storytelling powers of interactive CD-ROMs with From Alice to Ocean, a narrative of a cross-Australia trek, and Passage to Vietnam, exploring that country as it opened up in the early 1990s. 24 Hours in Cyberspace took a snapshot of the booming industry in 1996, and One Digital Day in 1997 further explored our fascination with tech.

Smolan’s latest book, with collaborator Jennifer Erwitt, is the beautiful Blue Planet Run, about the drive to bring fresh drinking water to everyone on Earth. It’s packed with glorious (and sometimes shocking) images and data about our planet’s water. In an unprecedented move, Amazon.com offers Blue Planet Run as a free PDF download. Download the free PDF of Blue Planet Run >>

Photojournalist James Nachtwey sees his TED Prize wish come true, as we share his powerful photographs of XDR-TB, a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis that’s touching off a global medical crisis. Learn how to help at http://www.xdrtb.org

About James Nachtwey

Photojournalist James Nachtwey is considered by many to be the greatest war photographer of recent decades. He has covered conflicts and major social issues in more than 30 countries.

Accepting his 2007 TED Prize, war photographer James Nachtwey shows his life’s work and asks TED to help him continue telling the story with innovative, exciting uses of news photography in the digital era.

About James Nachtwey

Photojournalist James Nachtwey is considered by many to be the greatest war photographer of recent decades. He has covered conflicts and major social issues in more than 30 countries.

For the past three decades, James Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues, working in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.

Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with Time since 1984. However, when certain stories he wanted to cover — such as Romanian orphanages and famine in Somalia — garnered no interest from magazines, he self-financed trips there. He is known for getting up close to his subjects, or as he says, “in the same intimate space that the subjects inhabit,” and he passes that sense of closeness on to the viewer.

In putting himself in the middle of conflict, his intention is to record the truth, to document the struggles of humanity, and with this, to wake people up and stir them to action.

“Reticent about discussing his own life beyond the basic facts, he’s clearly one of those rare characters who focus singularly on their work with a missionary-like sense of purpose.”

The photo director for National Geographic, David Griffin knows the power of photography to connect us to our world. In a talk filled with glorious images, he talks about how we all use photos to tell our stories.

About David Griffin

As director of photography for National Geographic, David Griffin works with some of the most powerful photographs the world has ever seen.

David Griffin has one of the world’s true dream jobs: He’s the director of photography for National Geographic magazine. He works with photo editors and photographers to set the visual direction of the magazine — which in turn raises the bar for photographers around the world.

Griffin offers an intriguing look into the magazine’s creative process on his blog, Editor’s Pick, where he talks about how the magazine uses its extraordinary photos to tell compelling stories.

“Photojournalists of David Griffin’s quality come along perhaps once a generation.”